Alberto Fujimori, the farewell of another Latin American strongman

Latin America is bidding goodbye to another one of the autocrats who have marked its long history of leaders and dictators: Alberto Fujimori died on Wednesday in Lima, Peru at the age of 86, surrounded by his children. Following the death of the most unusual autocrat of them all, a serene and enigmatic university professor of Japanese descent, the country is wondering whether to give him a state funeral as it would one of its illustrious figures, a decision that would involve transporting his body in a solemn funeral procession across the streets of Lima and holding a wake in the cathedral. Fujimori continues to be a headache for Peru, even in death.

He led the country for 10 years, during which time he confronted leftist guerrillas with methods that would earn him a long sentence for violating human rights. In his first presidential election, after campaigning as a complete unknown, he defeated the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature. President Fujimori got fed up with the institutions and the bureaucracy, which he considered tedious and paralyzing, and so he staged a self-coup in 1992. With the support of the armed forces, he dissolved parliament and governed by decree for a few months. But the tragic fate of Peruvian presidents — either the grave or prison time — was waiting for him just around the corner. Amid videos exposing the corruption of his administration, he traveled to Tokyo and from there he sent in his resignation via a hotel fax machine. But Congress did not accept his resignation and instead voted to dismiss him under a legal figure that termed him as “morally unfit” to govern, a disgrace reserved for insane or incompetent leaders.

Born in Lima in 1938, where his parents emigrated from the Japanese village of Kamachi, Fujimori took advantage of the crisis of the traditional parties in 1990 to present himself as an outsider just weeks before the election, campaigning on a tractor. In this way, he surprisingly won the trust of the people. At that time, he was nothing more than an anonymous 50-year-old man who taught classes at the university. People liked the aura he portrayed of an earnest, mathematical man, whom everyone imagined with a calculator in his hand. Peru at that time was suffering from a brutal economic crisis, with an annual inflation of 7,000%, and was in need of a savior. Peruvians saw one in him. His slow manner, his parsimony and his sentimental restraint made him an enigma. After almost four decades of public exposure, the feeling is that someone impenetrable has left, as mysterious as he was when he arrived.

His campaign debate against Vargas Llosa will go down in history. The writer presented a liberal recipe against rampant inflation and announced an economic shock from the start. He did not hide his intentions: he was honest, and that eventually scared off voters. He was also perceived, probably unfairly, as an enlightened bourgeois who also lived in Europe. Fujimori referred to him as Vargas, to belittle him. The fact is that Fujimori won and Vargas Llosa lost, which forced the novelist to sit down and write again and produce a few wonderful works. In that sense, literature won. The other candidate took command of the country and chained together a succession of events that would later earn him a 16-year prison sentence. He was released 10 months ago to die in freedom, to the dismay of the victims of the massacres he is accused of having ordered.

Fujimori has overshadowed Peruvian political life for four decades. Emerging from nowhere, he divided the country into supporters of Fujimori and detractors of Fujimori. The two sides are equally passionate about their beliefs. His supporters praise his hard line against terrorism and his success in controlling inflation, unemployment and the chaos in which previous governments had settled permanently. He adopted neoliberal measures that had an immediate effect, but which in the long run have not reduced inequality. He also faced off against a guerrilla group as violent as the Shining Path, capable of beheading, one by one, dozens of people kneeling in a village in the interior of Peru. The way he fought it brought him criticism from other countries and later trials in international courts. The country was filled with blood and levels of violence like few had seen on a continent that had already seen it all. The leader of the Shining Path was Abimael Guzmán, an overweight Marxist-Leninist-Maoist with horn-rimmed glasses who instilled in his followers an uncontrolled homicidal mentality. Fujimori managed to capture him, in what would be one of the greatest achievements of his administration. Guzmán died exactly three years ago today, on September 11. He was also 86 years old, as Fujimori was at the time of his own death.

Although he appeared to be a rigid man, he sometimes showed signs of flexibility in public. He danced technocumbia on stage at events during his last campaign. He was a populist when the word was still not so fashionable. He liked to project the image of a dedicated president, and that made him fly to remote places where landslides or floods had occurred to put on boots and walk through the mud. He also anticipated the phenomenon of the politician without a party who reaches the presidency and creates a movement that in a short time takes over almost all the resources of the State, as Álvaro Uribe would later do in Colombia or, more recently, Nayib Bukele in El Salvador. Despite the fact that the Peruvian Constitution limited presidential terms to two, he ran for a third, claiming that the first one did not count, since at that time the provision had come into force. He was a master of the small print.

He linked his destiny to that of Vladimiro Montesinos, the head of the intelligence service, a teetotal and orderly lawyer who was beginning to lose his hair when they first met. He made him his main advisor. Montesinos placed microphones in offices, vehicles and toilets, with which he recorded thousands of hours of banal conversations of officials who knew they were being spied on. He also wrote everything down in notebooks, which, in the long run, would cost him dearly. He and Fujimori would take a nap in the afternoon and meet at dawn, which gave them an aura of conspirators. The advisor instilled in the president the paranoia that he was going to be assassinated and advised him to move with his family to the headquarters of SIN, the intelligence service. From there, Montesinos used cameras to monitor the entire city, the airport and the homes of his main enemies, wishing to know with whom they were meeting. Montesinos was a little god inside those offices, which he built to his liking as a perpetual voyeur. Over the years he recorded hundreds of meetings. He left visual evidence of the bribes with which he bought off opponents, businessmen and media owners. The leak of those videos, known as vladivideos, ended his career, along with that of Fujimori. Both men sank tied to the same rock. The name Montesinos — who is still alive and still in prison — will forever be associated with espionage, trickery, conspiracy and collusion. Fujimori’s name, with excesses and the violation of basic rights. Together, Fujimori and Montesinos created the Colina Group, an army detachment formed expressly to make opponents disappear under the guise of anti-terrorist operations.

They called him El Chino (The Chinaman) because of his Asian ancestry. If it bothered him, he never verbalized it. In fact, he used it in his campaigns to appear close to the lower classes. His fall was as abrupt as his rise. El Chino did not know the slow life or the plain, the valley. Only the storm. That vital impulse made him travel to Chile in 2005, five years after sending the famous fax, in an attempt to revive his political career. It did not work out for him; in fact he was arrested and extradited to Peru, where a string of accusations awaited him. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the atrocities committed by a military unit. He served 16 and was released last year after receiving a controversial pardon. He opened social media accounts and began to generate content as an influencer. He asked for a driver and the pension that corresponded to him as a former president, and it was granted. His daughter Keiko, the owner of a party with which she has run for president three times and has come close to achieving it each time, hinted that his father was ready to run again in the 2026 elections. And, why not, to govern until 2032. But it turns out that Fujimori was mortal and passed away on September 11, a victim of cancer. The uncomfortable farewell of Latin American leaders awaits him.

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